Notices by Carly Sagan (carlysagan@mastodon.social)

I genuinely don’t know what to do. If there is no funding for space pollution and I’m stuck with all-male departments holding me back, I’m not in the best place to fight. All I can say is, if you are doing science, stop going down rabbit holes. Stop researching fantasy. Stop prioritizing your h-index. We need you to fight for a safe, clean, and healthy planet.

When I view science as under a state of collapse, everything about my scientific career suddenly makes sense. Of course there is no funding for nuanced problems. Of course there are very few opportunities - of which most are canned narratives in which I have zero authority to steer the research. Of course 99% of academics ignore or dismiss my scientific questions. Of course everyone is going down a rabbit hole. We’re not in a golden age of science. We’re on the brink of collapse.

I was reading an article somewhere in which someone with long covid said that they can’t even finish watching a movie.

And I thought, how bad does world decay have to get before entertainment as a career becomes obsolete because we’ve decided as a society that entertainment is just not fucking appropriate anymore?? Or as diseases and fires rage and space debris falls everywhere, will people *really* still be filming and singing???

What is really, really terrifying now is that it simply doesn’t matter how much danger or debris SpaceX makes, E-Mush will get the go ahead to do it again.

He is filling the atmosphere with toxic pollution. So it begs the question - are we sacrificing our entire planet for one man???

Great, so now space debris is just washing up on popular vacation beaches?? It’s a perfect metaphor for what’s really going on: the space industry is polluting our one paradise https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/21/science/blue-origin-spacex-debris-bahamas-europe/index.html

That said, I don’t think the Black Hawk down situation had a lot to do with this trifecta. It was a simple mistake. Air Traffic didn’t mention 2 jets or where the jets were. So Black Hawk apparently thought there was one jet. It all happens very fast. One, tiny error on both sides in a matter of seconds can lead to disaster and mass death in aerospace. That’s why with all the increasing pressures of today, I really think flights should be seen as luxury only and not the norm.

Commercial aviation is facing a trifecta of impending disaster: covid, space debris, & anti-DEI. Jet pilots are getting covid every year of service with no safety net in place. Space debris is falling all the time now (& can hit airplanes). Anti-DEI targeting is removing & discouraging the best & brightest workers. I personally (as a pilot) will think very long & hard before getting on any commercial aircraft again.

If we view blowing up our atmosphere as “entertainment,” we are not going to make it as a species. Thank you for attending my TED talk.

@cstross lol. Can we just start ignoring him and maybe that’d do it. We’re not going to have a village on Mars. Teslas are exploding and gross. Starlink is polluting every last pristine slice of sky. He’s a sexist social media embarrassment and nothing else

@juergen_hubert @cstross there needs to be a global limit on wealth bc this is inevitable when an attention-seeking rando gets too much money. If you’ve attained $1B, you should be legally done with acquiring more. It’s insane.

An Icelander asked if I had Twitter. I said I have Mastodon. Their response was, “Mastodon? What the hell?” So… it sounds like we need to do more Iceland-promos on here. So here are some pretty Iceland shots I took recently

I was wondering how much time scientists spend applying for funding - & *wow* - I found a SciAm article saying that a 2007 study found that faculty spent 40% of their time looking for funds (!!). Obv., worse now. The article goes on to say that it’d be cheaper in some cases to award funding to everyone bc of how expensive the reviewer process is. Makes me feel better about not having funding, but omg, academia needs serious mental help? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dr-no-money/

A private jet pilot tangential to my work has had covid “at least 4 times.” That’s for private (with less interaction with the public), so commercial must be way worse. We now know that each covid infection causes brain damage & increases risk of disability. I don’t see how this works out. If the average pilot is getting covid at least once a year, we are going to run out of pilots very, very soon. Enjoy your unnecessary flights bc there’s just no way this is going to continue much longer.

A polar bear floated over to Iceland from (presumably) Greenland. Which is such an amazing feat of nature that I didn’t know was happening regularly. And they immediately shot and killed it. My god. It should be globally illegal to immediately shoot and kill an endangered creature? I’m so sad. https://grapevine.is/news/2024/09/19/polar-bear-spotted-in-iceland/

I’m disturbed by the number of women & ppl of color critiquing a presidential candidate that is like them - a woman & person of color. But women, if you think you might leave, just know that Iceland is not it. I’ve scoped it out. I’ve interviewed at pretty much every company here with not a single job offer. There are no opportunities for women. Zip. Zero. Nada. There’s just a law saying they’re “supposed” to hire you.

So, it’s a big fat myth that Iceland has opportunity for women.

@robotistry @ShadSterling imo, there shouldn’t have been an award for these two at all. I’ve been on the receiving end of an AI-created document and it only created annoyance and chaos. These guys are the opposite of science and order. They are just noise. Pretty much every physicist I know is more deserving of a nobel than them. It is a total failure of the Nobel committee.

If a Nobel prize in physics went to machine learning and a guy with a bachelor of arts in psychology, the Nobel now means absolutely nothing. It’s officially just a dumb token for white men.

@ShadSterling huge betrayal. Most of my education is in physics, but I did my master’s in algorithm development and built some NNs. That is NOT physics. It’s just so, so sad that they stooped this low. AI is a bullshit machine. & giving a nobel in physics to a guy that never got any education in physics whatsoever is insanely disrespectful to anyone who is an actual physicist. Wtaf. It’s a meaningless token now.

It seems like every other car on the road is a Tesla, so I decided to count. In my short trip to a cafe (about 10 min away) & back I counted 47 Teslas. FORTY SEVEN. How can that many ppl want to support a horrible billionaire who is destroying our atmosphere? Buying a Tesla is funding Starlink & Starlink may destroy the ozone & more - so think deeper than just “Ouuu, cool electric Elon car.” It’s not cool. And it’s not helping the environment whatsoever.

There’s a lot unknown about our ionosphere and magnetosphere. It’s an active area of science. And the fact that we’re going to fill it up with trash and add to the unknowns is terrifying.

I am so disappointed with science. I just cannot fathom how I could get so much media contact and not get funding after applying all spring/summer. It’s just so ironic how the health of the systems that literally keep us alive are not enough of a money-maker for anyone to care.